Hard Landing

The jets of the big airlines are as full as they've been since the half-off sales of two summers ago, making it a challenge for some vacationers to get the cheap seats they were counting on. With airplanes averaging more than two-thirds full, the least expensive tickets are hard to come by on flights to popular tourist spots, travel agents say. The reasons for this range from improvements in the economy to airline cutbacks.

They said it wouldn't happen again, too much had changed, the whole world had changed, and most of all Seattle had grown wise to the punishing consequences of trying to subsist as a company town. So naturally it had to happen again. After riding high and sassy through the national recession, Seattle and the satellite cities around Puget Sound saw their fashionable, good-times tranquillity spoiled Thursday when the locally headquartered Boeing Co.

Throughout history, crisis has been the breeding ground for change. California's recent economic plunge and its offspring, the state budget crisis, presented just such an opportunity, one that could have fundamentally changed the manner in which governments at all levels in California operate. For a fleeting moment in the spring it looked as though California's leaders might seize the opportunity and run with it. What went wrong?

A helicopter pilot who landed too hard Tuesday at Montgomery Field escaped injury, although the helicopter was damaged, airfield operators said. The landing rendered the craft unable to fly, and it had to be moved from the airfield, said Bill Matson, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman. The pilot was the only one aboard the McDonnell Douglas 500 helicopter, which suffered damage to its undercarriage in the minor accident which occurred around 12:50 p.m.

A helicopter based at the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin made a "hard landing" during desert training exercises Friday, injuring all 17 Marines on board, officials said. None of the Marines were listed in serious condition. Although the extent of injuries was not released, officials said three Marines had serious enough injuries that they were flown to the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton for treatment.

The favorite parlor game among economists these days is to speculate on the possibility of a "hard landing" for the U.S. economy under George Bush--a dramatic crunch in which the postponed consequences of budget and trade deficits suddenly become apparent, retroactively discrediting Ronald Reagan as well as Bush.

Joseph Walker, a self-described sport jumper, knew something was amiss soon after he leaped from a 36-story building in downtown Los Angeles today. "I looked up, and the parachute was only three-fourths open," Walker said. "I knew I was going to hit hard. Then I hit--very hard." Walker, 27, suffered a chipped heel bone and a compressed vertebra after his 1:30 a.m. jump from the WCT building at 1100 Wilshire Blvd. He was treated at Good Samaritan hospital and released.

The fuselage of an Eastern Airlines DC-9 carrying 104 people cracked open when it made a hard landing, and three people suffered minor injuries, officials said today. The 99 passengers and five-member crew of Flight 573 were evacuated through chutes at Pensacola Regional Airport shortly after the landing at 11:40 p.m. Sunday, said Jack Barker of the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta. "I thought it would crash and burn," said passenger Tyrone Taylor.

A pilot from Colorado escaped unhurt Tuesday when his helicopter crashed while stringing high-tension wiring for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a rugged section of the Angeles National Forest near Palmdale. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt.